If you don’t quite have the spare cash to buy a Jolla Phone, or don’t own a Nexus 4, but still want to try Jolla’s Sailfish OS on your smartphone, here’s your chance, as Jolla has just released their “Sailfish OS Hardware Adaptation Development Kit”, which allows you to install Sailfish OS on any Android phone that supports CyanogenMod 10.1.

The development kit is comprised of:

Mer core – The Linux userspace core

Android Hardware Adaptation (HA/HAL), consisting of:

Device-specific Android Kernel

Binary device drivers taken from an Android ROM (e.g. CyanogenMod)

The libhybris interface built against the binary drivers

Middleware packages depending on hardware-specific plugins

A Qt/Wayland QPA plugin utilizing the Android hwcomposer

Sailfish OS component

You’ll a smartphone and a build machine matching the following hardware and software pre-requisites:

Smartphone

ARMv7 Android device officially supported by CyanogenMod 10.1.x

Means to do backup and restore of the device contents (e.g. SD card or USB cable to host computer), as well as flash recovery images to the device

If you’ve got all that, you’ll need to follow the build instructions found in a 57-page PDF explaining how to prepare the device, setup the SDK, setting up a scratchbox2 target, packaging the droid HAL, creating the sailfish OS rootfs, flashing the rootfs image, and more… So it’s not really an easy “three steps solution” at this stage, and you may want to do this on a “spare” phone…

This is all new, and things may not work as expected, hence the following warning can be found in the document:

Modifying or replacing your device’s software may void your device’s warranty, lead to data loss, hair loss, financial loss, privacy loss, security breaches, or other damage, and therefore must be done entirely at your own risk. No one affiliated with this project is responsible for your actions but yourself. Good luck.